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  1. Shane Jones [aka Mr gob-gas] knows he and his portfolio are now utterly “irrelevant”. He is simply a blowhard jellyfish and should not be in parliament at all! Shane, time to ‘go out to pasture’ – you are not wanted and clearly not needed. Move on before you are shoved out. Voters can only take so much BS and cr&p and we’re over it!

  2. The real purpose of those oil industry subsidies is not to find gas. The real purpose is:
    1.) to give a boost to businesses in regions like Taranaki that will have a role in providing supporting services to the overseas corporations. So it’s an indirect subsidy to business (CoC’s electoral base) that passes through the hands of those foreign corporates.
    2.) exploration itself juices up the GDP numbers for a while, irrespective of whether gas is found or not – thus making ‘mastermind’ Luxon’s growth plan look like it’s working
    3.) it’s an ideological stand against the logic of climate science. If belief in climate science is weakened, this has huge short-term advantages to business and agriculture right across the economy. Long-term though it will harm them enormously.
    4.) it enables them to blame our current energy price crisis on Labour – on the completely spurious grounds that if new exploration licenses had not been banned in Labour’s first term, there would now be gas from completely new sources flowing through the pipes. The lead time on commercialising gas that has not even been found yet is decades. So this is a complete lie that was repeated by Luxon on Morning Report today. But lying about it deflects the blame from where it really lies – on the Key government for part-privatising the gentailers and thus creating perverse incentives to increase profits and shareholder dividends by creating an artificial energy shortage through not investing in renewables and battery storage.
    5.) building on no.4 – this deflection from the folly of Key’s part-privatisation of the gentailers is essential. Because more broadly, if this folly was widely understood, it is a dagger to the heart of the economic fantasies that justify the neoliberal project which the CoC are re-inflicting on us with all the single-minded zealotry we last saw in the early 1990’s.

    1. Reminds me of the sort of thing the corkscrew-twisted Sir Humphrey Appleby would come out with on Yes, Minister, whenever the time came to explain some policy that hardly made sense to a reasonable person: ‘but you see, Minister, “the real purpose” is 1, 2, 3, 4, 5,’

    2. I could be wrong but the Labour Government did not ban oil and gas exploration, instead, they stopped issuing new licences. Permits currently held extend out to 2050.

    3. Re Christopher Luxon’s comment this morning that “Labour caused the energy crisis”, why didn’t RNZ’s interviewer Corin Dann challenge Luxon on this false statement and ask him to explain it?

      This applies to other interviewers/presenters who accept inaccurate/dishonest statements from Government MPs, without asking open questions i.e. – how, why, when, where who, what. Surely this is basic interviewing/reporting. 

      1. Because when the overseas press junkets are dished out….if you question them too critically, You will not be invited….”blackballed”
        And another thing….Baldrick appears on his weekly talk with about 4 mins before the top of the hour…there is never enough time to do an in-depth interview….just sound bites & platitudes!

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